Having Your Second Child: What To Expect

When you are due to have your second child, there is no doubt that it can be an exciting time. However, you are also likely to be nervous, and there are many things that you might be keen to try and make sure of if you are going to be able to do it right and approach it in the right way. There are many ways in which having your second child is quite different from having your first, so it’s great if you can be as prepared for those as possible.

In this post, we are going to discuss some of the things to expect when you are having your second child. These things are going to be important for you to consider here if you want to make sure that you are as ready as possible for the experience, so let’s take a look at them right now.

Jealousy From Your First Born

One of the most vital things that will happen and which you need to prepare for is that your firstborn child is likely to get jealous. This is a common experience and one that is perfectly natural too. However, it might be that you want to try and assuage this early on as best as you can, as doing so could be useful for the family as a whole.

If your firstborn child is getting jealous of the attention the newborn is getting, you can get around that early by talking to them excitedly about their new baby brother or sister and making sure to involve them all the way. This is a good way to make sure that they don’t let their jealousy get the better of them. Besides, the jealousy normally passes after a while anyway, so it’s just one of those phases that may occur.

Nursing Difficulties

One of the problems that parents often run into when they have their second child is that they don’t quite know what to do about the nursing situation. After all, depending on timings, it might be that you are still nursing your first child and you are not ready to wean off just yet. So you will want to keep on with that, but also nurse your second child as well.

The truth is that this can be simpler than you might think. You just need to try tandem nursing, which is a good technique for dealing with this as well as possible. For more on that, you might want to check out this article: What Is Tandem Nursing And How Does It Work? It could be that this makes the whole experience so much easier to contend with.

Perfection Doesn’t Matter

When you have your first baby, it is very common to try and be the perfect parent, for everything to go as smoothly as possible. However, by the time you come to have your second, you have already learned what a pipe dream truly is, and that means that you are much less likely to hold on to that particular idea. You won’t find yourself trying to be a perfect parent the second time around, and that is a really good thing. It means that you can open yourself up more to simply being a good parent, which is all that you need to do, and that is something that can make the parenting experience so much easier on the whole.

If you can be prepared for this change of approach, you are less likely to worry about it when you notice it. So make sure that you are aware of this from the outset.

It’s Easier Than You Think

Something that most people find is that having a second child is a lot easier than the first, even though you know how to look after two children. It is easier than you think to take care of both of them and not much harder than just having one. So if you are worried at the moment about what it is going to be like, try not to be. It’s one of those things that are just going to be a lot easier and simpler than you had assumed.

As you can see, there are a few things to expect when you have your second baby. Make sure that you are aware of these if you want to enjoy the experience as well as possible.

*This is a collaborative post

Photo by Gustavo Fring

Jacob Myers